Sigma Sport spins up 28% higher revenue with Google Optimize 360

If you’re a road cyclist or triathlete, chances are you know Sigma Sport. This global retailer sells bikes, clothing, energy bars, anti-chafe balm and everything else you need to power your way through your next big event — or just enjoy your next friendly ride in the country.

Recently Sigma Sport set out to address a vital need: to find more customers with high potential lifetime value. “Growth with high-value customers is key to our success,” says Nik Hill, the company’s Head of Digital. “We knew we needed to change our website experience to better engage these customers.”

Using Optimize 360, Merkle | Periscopix created an experiment where they replaced Sigma Sport’s homepage carousel with brand-specific images of the site’s three top-performing brands: Castelli, Specialized, and Assos. Then they targeted the experiment to the audiences they had already built in Analytics.

This allowed Merkle | Periscopix to serve personalized experiences to fans of each brand. “We used the Analytics audience targeting feature in Optimize 360 to serve bespoke experiences to subsets of users,” says Shahina Meru, Associate Analytics Lead at Merkle | Periscopix. “We created three distinct Analytics audiences who had earlier bought or interacted with the top three brands, then used these as targeting rules in Optimize 360. Anyone who had looked at or bought a Specialized bike in the past, for instance, now saw Specialized products in their carousel.”

When Sigma Sport tested its new personalized home page, they saw right away that it was a hit with users. The experiment drove a 28% rise in revenue and a 32% increase in e-commerce conversion rate during the experiment. In fact, Sigma Sport saw uplift across the entire customer journey with a 90%+ probability to beat the baseline.

The bottom line: Personalization worked, both for bike-shopping customers and for Sigma Sport. Now Merkle | Periscopix is looking for more ways to enhance user experience with personalization from
Analytics and Optimize 360.